The Cereal Box Syndrome

SETI* has long been the province of the radioastronomer.
While this, in itself, is neither bad news nor good, these early workers and
their attitudes have left an indelible imprint on the field that persists to
this day. One year after Cocconi and Morrison first seriously proposed a search
at the 21-cm wavelength, Ronald Bracewell suggested the use of interstellar
spaceprobes for communication among sentient races. However, many SETI workers
for years have virtually ignored this possibility, and have, maintained that
listening for , radio signals of intelligent extrasolar origin is the only reasonable
way to open up interstellar communications. "All this stuff about traveling
around the universe," remarked one well-known American radio physicist in an
oft-quoted passage, "belongs back where it came from, on the cereal box."

It seems to be the nature of this "Cereal Box Syndrome" that those affected,
seldom recognize their affliction. This is a potentially serious problem as
radio-based SETI research enters the megabuck funding range and thereby risks
unnecessarily "pricing itself out" of an already parsimonious market.
Alternative less-expensive search programs based on the concept of advanced
spacefaring automata have been devised and continue to be developed. Why, then,
the traditional intellectual hostility to the idea of interstellar missions?

The first reason is simply the lack of interested practitioners. A mere
handful of lucky individuals are fortunate enough to be able to devote their
full time to SETI, and perhaps only a few hundred others can manage a part-time
commitment to the field. There simply are not enough people to properly
investigate all possibilities. The genesis of SETI was in radio astronomy and
radio physics, and these elements, aided by the presence of a few rather
strong-willed personalities, have combined to create a kind of snowballing
effect. That is, the emphasis on radio techniques is most diligently studied,
hence gains more respectability, thus attracts more workers, whose work adds yet
more credibility to the effort, and so on.

A second cause of the Cereal' Box Syndrome is the frequent confusion of the
issues of interstellar travel, and interstellar probes. The first
may imply a manned component; the latter generally does not. Too many SETI
scientists have been stung by the "UFO" issue. Understandably, they are
reluctant to associate themselves with any endeavor which might be
misinterpreted by the public as endorsing alien visitations or be scorned by
academic colleagues as credulous. But manned and unmanned missions are entirely
different things. Interstellar vehicles which must be man-rated, protected
against the hostile hard-vacuum high-radiation environment of space, carry
expendables able to support human life for decades or centuries and permit a
return voyage may be vastly more complex and expensive than fully-automated
unmanned spaceprobes on one-way trips.

The third reason for hostility to the notion of interstellar flight as a significant
factor in SETI is the physical and economic argument that extrasolar missions
are grossly impractical. However, as Robert Forward of Hughes Laboratories has
often pointed out, in each case the only thing proven is that various sets of
initial assumptions can be chosen to give the appearance of immense difficulty.
Recently a group of scientists and engineers working under the auspices of the
British Interplanetary Society on "Project Daedalus" produced, after a five-year
study, a preliminary design for an automated starship vehicle capable of exploring
out to about 10 light-years from the Sun. They concluded that such a mission
may become feasible for humanity sometime in the next century.

Calculations showing that the energy required to launch spacecraft to the stars
is equal to the total U.S. power generation for a century or will cost 100 gross
national products (GNP) are really irrelevant to SETI. This is because these
computations chauvinistically presume current human society to be the standard
of comparison for the entire universe. Yet almost certainly any race capable
of transmitting either radio signals or interstellar probes for SETI purposes
must be far in advance of ourselves, possibly on the level of a Kardashev Type
II civilization (utilizing a major fraction of the energy output of their sun).
It is a simple matter to calculate that to launch a 100,000 ton vehicle on a
one-way trip at 1-gee acceleration to a destination 100 light-years away would
require an equivalent relative energy expenditure for a Type II civilization
as the launching of a few Saturn V rockets represented to American society a
decade ago (about one percent of the GNP annually). Clearly, active interstellar
exploration by advanced cultures will require commitment but hardly an outrageous
sacrifice.

The last factor contributing to the pervasiveness of the Cereal Box Syndrome
is the lack, until recently, of a well-defined observational program to search
for probes such as now exists for radio-SETI. Ronald Bracewell originally proposed
that a circular circumsolar orbit somewhere within the stellar "habitable zone"
for carbon-water life might be the most logical place to park a visiting extraterrestrial
messenger craft, though this represents a rather large search volume. Other
suggestions have included the lunar surface by M. W. Saunders, the Earth/Moon
Lagrangian points L4 and L5 by Anthony Lawton, the Asteroid Belt. by Michael
Papagiannis, and Lagrangian "halo orbits" generally by myself. Additional (and
surprisingly inexpensive) search proposals are currently being developed, and
the first explicit SETI search for Earth-orbiting interstellar probes was recently
reported in Icarus (Vol. 42, June 1980 [Ref]). This program was conducted at a total cost
of about three hundred dollars.

Twenty years after the historic OZMA project, the serious search for extraterrestrial
artifacts in our Solar System has finally begun.

Dr. Freitas is Director of Space Initiativewhich publishes "Lobbying
for Space: The space Lobbyist's Handbook" and provides information on Congressional
voting records and other materials useful for promoting increased activity in
space. He has written numerous papers and articles which have been published
in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Mercury, Omni, Analog,
Astronomy and other journals. Currently he is writing a book "Xenology",
a comprehensive scientific treatment of the subject of SETI and life beyond
the earth. This summer Dr. Freitas is participating in a NASA Goddard - University
of Maryland sponsored program on "Computer Science, Key to a Space Program Renaissnace."